Food in Japan, part 3

Intro

In my previous two food posts I covered what I consider to be mostly large meals, or at least meals that are capable of carrying themselves on their own. In this post, I want to take a look at smaller dishes I tried in Japan, as well as less Japanese dishes with that specific twist.

Tempura

Tempura is generally served as part of a dish, say in an udon soup as a topping, or as part of a set meal. However, as with all Japanese endemic dishes, the Japanese take their tempura very seriously. With tempura, the emphasis usually lies on the quality of the batter, and the restaurant’s famous, original, own dipping sauce with daikon and spring onions. The restaurants all come with backstories describing hundreds of years of secret recipe-keeping, with regards to the sauce, and any inquiry into the recipe will get you banned for life from a tempura restaurant (just kidding).

I ended up never going to a tempura-specific restaurant, but did nonetheless have a lot of tempura in Japan. It is hard to say which was best, as the tempura was usually not taking up most of my attention, but I really enjoyed the tempura that came with my soba noodles at 増田屋 新宿南口店 in Tokyo.

Okonomiyaki

Okonomiyaki is often described as a savoury pancake, though really it is more like a noodle omelette. Interestingly, it is often either cooked on a large teppan grill in front of the customers, or is served onto a small grill on the customers table. Both of those methods of serving food are considered not done in The Netherlands. In Japan it is the norm, and many Japanese seem to like it.

I tried okonomiyaki on two occassions, in Kyoto and in Hiroshima. Hiroshima is known for its okonomiyaki which is different than in the rest of Japan, because it has much more cabbage and is layered instead of mixed. I preferred the Hiroshima style okonomiyaki to the one in Kyoto, which I found too mushy. This was undoubtedly also due to the fact that the restaurant where I had okonomiyaki in Kyoto was much less good.

It was very interesting to see the workflow in the Hiroshima restaurant, which was separated into three stations: the first chef dealt with boiling noodles and waiting tables; a second chef was in control of the teppan grill and made most of the dish; and a third chef made the dish table-ready by plating the omelette and adding the cold toppings and sauce. Stations are a recurring theme in all restaurants of the world, but the specificity of Japanese restaurants, combined with the seemingly lifelong loyalty to a single job, makes the life of a Japanese chef seem very monotonous.

The restaurant we went to in Hiroshima was called Hazeya, and it is fairly nearby the okonomiyaki restaurant that had the highest online score. Hazeya has a slightly lower score, but is also far less busy, and the people there are all locals and businessmen, a couple of whom wanted to take a picture with me.

Hotcakes

I had never heard of the Japanese obsession with pancakes before reaching Japan, but ended up pleasantly surprised upon finding out. Japanese pancakes resemble very closely the fluffy American pancakes that almost no one in the world does not enjoy. Japan has a second kind of pancake, sold by (at least what I know of) the chain of pancake restaurants called “gram” (all lowercase). These are extremely fluffy pancakes, about 5 centimeters tall, sadly made in small batches and sold out, even at the less busy restaurants, very quickly. I never had a chance to try them.

gram certainly has other, delicious, “standard”-pancake meals, loaded with savoury toppings such as chilli beans and sausage, or for instance with bacon, banana and maple syrup. In Nara I had pancakes with scrambled eggs and thick slices of bacon at gram, and they were excellent. I would certainly advice walking into any random pancake-selling restaurant in Japan and going full force.

Yakitori

In Hiroshima we also went to a Yakitori restaurant, by far the loudest restaurant we visited. The food was very good, many different kinds of grilled-on-a-stick foods, ranging from weird cuts of meat, to weird animal organs, to interesting vegetables. The many different sticks are brought to the table, where a table sized grill keeps everything warm while you drink more than you eat. The sticks are served with a personal set of dipping sauces, and for each dish you order the waiters will happily let you know which sauce fits best.

Invariably, everything you are wearing starts to smell like smoke, as the entire restaurant is completely bathed in grill-fumes, with large flash flames popping up in the open kitchen from time to time. The restaurant was busy and, worth mentioning again, very loud, because it was more of a bar with food than a real restaruant. This explains the mini table grills, and the crowd (business men, greasy shirt and tie), the drinks served (highball whiskeys) and the price (cheap as hell).

Gyoza

I had suprisingly few gyoza in Japan, in fact I think I only had them once or twice. That is not to say gyoza is not sold in many places, quite the contrary: almost every izakaya in Japan serves gyoza, and I assume the quality is great. The main difference between gyoza in Japan and outside of Japan is the sauce: in Japan, all the gyoza I had had some kind of thin broth in them, whereas elsewhere it seems to come with some kind of dipping sauce.

The best gyoza I had in japan were at an izakaya in Tokyo, called “gyoza factory” just below Shinjuku station. I had just bought a new yoyo from the Tokyo yoyo-shop and was trying it out in the restaurant, resulting in a small applause from the chefs.